Our First Coyote Sighting

One recent night when we arrived home from work, as we turned up our driveway we noticed an animal in our orchard. This is certainly not unusual; we often see deer grazing in the orchard, eating the fruit that has fallen from the tree.

But there were two things different this time. For one, we haven't seen deer around our place in at least a month. As the snow level falls, the deer move further south to where the grass and other ground cover isn't perpetually covered by snow. But the other, more substantial difference, is that what we had initially assumed was a deer was only a few feet tall. As soon as we turned the corner, he took one look in our direction and quickly head over the ridge to the edge of the forest, where he waited in the shadows. We could barely see his pointed ears in the moon light, and by the time our car made it close enough to see better, he was off into the forest.

After parking, we head back down to check out the tracks. The snow wasn't particularly new, so the iciness didn't leave very clear tracks. It wasn't until several days later when we were working in the orchard (knocking down the remaining fruit from the trees and gathering them up - a dirty orchard breeds pests!) when we became sure of what we'd seen.

It was surely a coyote.

The ground underneath the one tree in the orchard which still has remains of fruit is scattered with A LOT of coyote droppings. They clearly frequent our dining establishment, only I guess they do it off-hours. We hear coyote howling at night on a fairly regular basis, but this was our first sighting.

- Mike (& Corinne)